Company-wide Agility : Jutta Eckstein & John Buck

Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be Agile. Lack of an overarching theory about how to expand the Agile Manifesto has led to many fragmented attempts to apply Agile company-wide.

Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book.

Notice, how they emphasize that doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for the whole company. Many experts are looking into implementing company-wide Agility. Yet, they work from one perspective. For example:

• A Beyond Budgeting expert might say, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won’t have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert might say, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert might say, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert might say, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but the perspective is always from within the discipline. Our new perspective synthesizes these approaches and invites you to take a new, overview perspective that can truly address the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

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